Revenue for Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the greatest knowledge resource on the Internet. It is a free encyclopedia created and overseen by the general public, which is to say, by the diverse community of Wikipedia's users and contributors, who number in the millions. Unlike most Internet giants, Wikipedia does not display advertisements. Instead it is paid for by a not-for-profit foundation that accepts donations from supporters. The Wikipedia Foundation enjoys a tax-exempt status as strictly a charitable organization. The problems of profit If the Wikipedia Foundation were to change its name to, let's say, the Wikipedia Enterprise ("We") and start demanding a fee-for-use or displaying advertisements or otherwise making money for its owners and investors, it would immediately lose both its tax-exempt status and all the charitable donations it now enjoys. Those two effects, alone, would be a calamity for the foundation. But there would a third effect, potentially even worse. What about the millions of past contributors who have given their efforts and their knowledge to Wikipedia for free over the past 10 years? Would they not then feel entitled to a share in the profit from what they themselves have created? A class-action suit on their behalf would destroy the new enterprise. So it cannot be done. Right? Well, not so fast. What cannot be done overnight can, perhaps, be done gradually, in an open, legal, fair-for-all manner that does not involve any sudden loss of status or donations. But how? Before saying how, let's look more closely at Wikipedia's founding principles. No advertising The lack of advertising revenue may be seen as a weakness by potential investors, but it is actually Wikipedia's greatest strength. The encyclopedia's articles are (almost) never cluttered with annoying pop-ups and distracting banners and sidebars, and, in large part because of this, users of Wikipedia have high confidence in the objectivity of information presented in articles written by collaborators who are many, diverse, and financially disinterested. Wikipedia aims at and usually achieves a balanced, easily verifiable presentation of objective truth because for each article the contributors interact with one another in an open forum attached to the article, and there they arrive over time at a consensus regarding everything in the article about which there is any disagreement among them. Because each section of each article is editable online, any reader can instantly join the community of contributors whenever something in an article appears to be mistaken, misleading or incomplete. This works! Skeptics have been proven wrong. Wikipedia is a resounding success. But it would not have worked if advertising had been the source of Wikipedia's revenue. Contributors to Wikipedia articles were volunteers who gave their knowledge freely to the encyclopedia without any financial compensation. If those articles had generated revenue for the Foundation from advertisers who made money because their ads appeared within, above or alongside the articles, objectivity would have been undermined. Unpaid contributors would have felt they were working, without pay, for the financial benefit of investors and advertisers, getting nothing in return themselves; and in most articles, particularly those about a profitable or charitable enterprise, or those on any subject related to such, the uncompensated contributors would tend to have been "crowded out" by persons who have a financial interest in what the articles say. No original research Early on, Wikipedia ran afoul of law pertaining to intellectual property, especially with regard to copyrighted images. It did not matter that users who uploaded images made no money. Whenever anyone distributes copyrighted material, even for free, without the permission of the copyright owner, they are doing harm to the owner and violating the law. Wikipedia addressed this problem by requiring copyright notifications on all images, and by not permitting any image to be displayed if the terms of the copyright requires monetary compensation to the owner. This problem, and its solution, are related to a second foundational principle: Wikipedia presents only information that is already generally known and widely accepted as true. In other words, Wikipedia only contains information that is "in the public domain," and is not a place for presenting original research, new discoveries, novel ideas or anything else that could be construed as being the author's intellectual property. Like the rule about no advertising, this "No original research" rule enhances the confidence that readers can have in the objectivity of articles. If someone does want to freely distribute his own intellectual creations, Wikipedia is not the place to do it. There are other places for that. Facebook is one; YouTube another. Unlike Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube get plenty of revenue from advertising, and they are even able to provide a source of revenue to those who post text, images and videos. There is no implication or pretense of objectivity at these Web sites. Everyone knows that what a user offers on these sites is the user's own particular views and creations.